Beginner's Guide To Searching For Medical Information Online
You can never have too many beginner's guides; everyone needs one at some point in time. I just noticed an introductory guide to searching for medical information online published at PLoS Medicine earlier this month:
Yet, as many a doctor will point out, the bigger problem with medical knowledge today is not its paucity, but the difficulty of navigating what there is. Finding the right answer quickly for a patient is difficult, and perhaps nothing will replace a good medical librarian in finding that information.The rise of the search engine Google (www.google.com), along with other freely available search engines, has made it easier to find information, although the clinical uses of Google have not been as well documented as those of PubMed [1]. Google will not point to the answer to every question, and often the articles it finds in response to your question are not freely available. But for many clinical scenarios, Google and other search engines can provide, quickly enough, an answer that is good enough. This article aims to provide tips that will help with these clinical scenarios, saving time that can be used with a medical librarian to answer more difficult problems.
I will be adding this to my list of useful references to point out to those folks who turn up at my virtual doorstep bearing questions.